The Mirrored Shard

6 The Island of Pelicans

IT TOOK US almost a full day to reach San Francisco, even as the jitney cruised along, overtaking all other vehicles we encountered. We were allowed off twice for rest-stop breaks, during which people jeered at us. A small, sticky-faced boy threw what remained of his sandwich at Cal, who bared his full ghoul smile and sent the brat screaming back to his mother.

I’d been a prisoner before, less than nothing in the eyes of all the people around me, and it was the same vile feeling I remembered from when Draven had locked me up in Lovecraft. I didn’t even feel like a person anymore, but like something on display, and the closer we came to the city, the sicker to my stomach I got.

When at last we reached the outer wall, I craned my neck to look out the window. I was finally here, and I couldn’t have been more helpless or less thrilled.

San Francisco was built atop a series of hills that plunged down into the deep, velvety water of the bay. I noticed a conical white tower atop the largest hill, fingers of aether drifting to and from it. Communications, I decided, and maybe power, a line running under the water directly to the engine.

Gentle fog ringed the hills like lace collars on refined women, and small beetle-backed streetcars ran on cables up and down the hills to charging stations glowing with green aether. They looked like lampreys in a stormy sea, their green lights drifting among the fog-capped hills.

The wall itself wasn’t much to look at. Iron spikes, rusty from the sea air, studded the outside, and ghoul traps, spitting aether fire laced with sulfur, ringed the base.

The gate was manned by a set of Proctors at ground level and two gunners with hunting rifles high in the tower. Nothing was getting into the city unseen, that much was certain.

I heard the horn of an airship as it drifted overhead sending out cables to tie up at the aether-ringed white tower I’d spotted earlier, and I felt an almost unbearable sense of longing. That should have been me. Not this, shackled in a filthy jitney with iron biting harder into my wrists and my sanity with every passing second.

The Proctors handed over some paperwork to the guards, and, as one, all three turned to stare at me.

Get a good look, I thought. Everybody stare at the big, bad, underweight teenage girl. A supervillain if there ever was one.

Cal was shuffled off the jitney with the other prisoners, but when I rose to follow, the guard pushed me back.

“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t you remember? You’re a special case, Miss Grayson. You’re going right across the bay.” She grinned. “To Alcatraz.”

The journey to Alcatraz Island felt nearly as interminable as the jitney ride, though it was in fact much shorter. The jitney moved at a snail’s pace through streets thronged with crowds, up and down hills so steep and sharp they jutted from the earth like razor blades.

Steam and smoke that smelled like a million different flavors coated my skin and tongue.

A bottle banged off the side of the jitney and exploded, scattering shards of glass across the roads, and the guard leaned out and let off a shot above the crowd’s head with her shock pistol.

There were screams, and all at once we had a clear path through the crowd.

“Damn hooligans,” the guard muttered. “You’d think this was the Wild West, not the biggest city in California.”

I remembered what Dean had said about San Francisco, that, unlike Lovecraft, the wall kept people too close together, that there often wasn’t enough food or enough aether or power, and that there were parts of the city where even the Proctors wouldn’t set foot.

Lovecraft had old sewers infested with ghouls, but at least I didn’t feel like I was closed in with a hundred thousand malcontents who could explode at any second.

We reached a pier, and I was transferred to a barge that stank of fish. More Proctors surrounded me in a tight ring, and all I could see was the rough water ahead and the glowing lamps strung across the Golden Gate Bridge.

The water grew rougher, and the Proctors seemed nervous, muttering and shifting the grips on their guns. Before us, I saw a great, glowing body slide to the surface and then duck back under. Not man-made aether, not running lights on a submersible, but something organic, a luminescence that kept pace with the boat until we reached the dock.

I’d seen a leviathan before, but it had been angry and starving, driven close to shore by the blast of the Lovecraft Engine. That leviathan had terrified me, but this one was different—it stared at us out of its many eyes studded all along its lean body, and then, with a keening cry, dipped back below the waves with a splash. I could tell we mattered less to it than the pull of the currents.

My shoulder had started to throb at its approach, the shoggoth venom recognizing its own kind.

“Will you look at that?” said my female guard. “Never seen one that close.”

“It’s that damn dot in the sky,” said another. “Been calling every monster out of the shadows. Must have something to do with the necrovirus.”

The woman snorted. I had to wonder how many of the Proctors even believed the lie.

The dock at Alcatraz wasn’t much to look at—I’d expected it to be far more intimidating. It was a simple wood pier; the only thing making it remarkable was the steel cage enclosing the walkway to a small white-brick building, probably to keep anyone from making a desperate leap over the side into the freezing bay. Knowing the leviathan was down there was plenty of deterrent for me, and I was shoved into the brick building, where the Proctors searched me again and blasted me with a controlled stream of steam to knock any parasites off me. It was unbearably hot, and then incredibly cold as the steam left moisture beads all over my exposed skin, dampening my clothes. I shivered, my teeth chattering.

“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked my guard.

She narrowed her eyes. “Use your imagination.”

I watched the tall square structure in front of us as we crossed the courtyard. Bars on the windows, the clang of cell doors echoing from inside and the general chatter of a lot of people locked in too small a space.

If you weren’t looking too closely, you’d have thought it was a normal prison. But I spotted wires running to a central hub on the roof and down to each bar. Electrified iron—to keep prisoners in or something else out, I couldn’t tell.

I also saw a flash from the top floor, blue light that flickered rhythmically and then shut off, over and over again. Each time it happened, the wires on the windows would buzz. Something was draining enormous power, and I had the distinct feeling I was about to find out what it was.

The guard handed me off to another woman, who processed my paperwork and then shoved me into a cell. When the door closed, the darkness was absolute.

I sat down, feeling my way to a dry spot, and put my head on my knees.

This could not have gone worse. I had completely failed. Failed Dean, failed my mother and father both.

I let a few tears leak out of my eyes, because if I didn’t, I was going to start screaming like many of the voices around me.

I wasn’t lost yet, I thought. I still had my sanity, at least until the iron lacing this place started to poison me.

Before it did, though, I could find a way out. I might not have been strong, and I might not have had much in the way of the sort of skills Dean had traded in—subterfuge and picking locks and being unseen—but I could use my wits to get out of this mess.

I breathed in, but the stench just reminded me where I was and I started to sob again.

“Don’t cry.”

The voice was a whisper, but I shrieked, not expecting anyone to be with me in this dark hole.

“Hello?” I said.

“Don’t cry, Aoife,” the voice whispered again.

I swallowed hard. My scar wasn’t throbbing, so I knew it wasn’t a monster, but a disembodied voice was never not going to be unsettling.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know a lot of things,” the voice said. “Been here a long while. Long before the Storm. Saw it all.”

“Are you …,” I started to ask, but my question was answered when the same kind of unearthly glow the leviathan had manifested sprang to life in the corner of the cell.

A small girl, younger than me, sat there, dressed in the sort of clothes you only saw in old magazines: pinafore, bloomers, a giant floppy bow holding back meticulous barrel curls.

She would have looked pretty normal, if out of date, except that she was almost entirely translucent, like one of the reels for an Edison lamp held against a light. She had the same oily, filmy quality, like she might flicker out of existence at any second.

“I’m dead,” she said in confirmation. “I died right here, in this room.”

“You don’t seem too upset about that,” I ventured. I stayed where I was, not sure if I even could move.

Ghost stories were popular among my old classmates at the Academy, but they’d always been just that—stories. Things to scare one another with that wouldn’t get us locked up for heresy, like stories of the Fae, or magic, or anything that wasn’t based in science would.

Ghosts, nobody could quantify. I’d certainly never expected to be sitting here talking to one.

Then again, I’d never expected to be locked up in the worst Proctor prison in the country, either.

“Of course I am,” she said. “I was the daughter of a guard. I had diphtheria, and I was in a fever haze. I heard a voice calling me, calling me.… In the fever, I thought it was an angel sent to take me home. But then I was here, in front of this door. I went in and I collapsed. Prisoners found me, shut my eyes, watched over me until my father came. But it was too late. This place drags you down. It always has.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

She sighed. “Just nine. But they always said I was bright for my age.”

“You talk to everyone who gets thrown in here?” I asked. Normal conversation was the only way I could keep my mind from screaming, There’s a dead girl, right in front of you, talking, and you need to panic.

“Oh no,” she said, and gave a smile that was a black razor slash across her face—a strange oily substance dribbling from her mouth, her eyes, her nostrils. “Just you, Aoife Grayson. Just you.”

Her voice wasn’t a little girl’s voice any longer. Had never been, I realized. She wasn’t a sad little ghost trapped here, dead of diphtheria. She was a recording, left in this place by someone who knew I’d be here.

“Why me?” I said again, a whisper this time. I was terrified. I’d traveled by the Gates, hopping worlds, and I’d spent enough time around the Fae that their cold skin and silver smiles hardly bothered me.

This, though—this wasn’t Fae or human, just pure malice talking to me, using my name.

“Because you’re looking for something you cannot have,” the ghost hissed. “You’re traveling to a place none of the living should go. And if you come any closer to the cold flame of death, it will burn you, Aoife Grayson.”

She flickered, and was so close to me we could have shared breath, if she’d had any. “Then you’ll come and you’ll stay,” she growled at me in a voice that sounded like rusty nails raking across bones. “You’ll stay in the Deadlands, just like all the rest who came before.”

She grabbed me by the chin, and her mouth was full of teeth, black lava glass bursting from her little-girl mouth. She was going to tear out my throat, and there was nothing I could do. Nothing except let pure panic flood my brain.

The cell door opened with a clang, and I screamed as light flooded in, burning the ghost out of existence and causing my pupils to react painfully.

“Come on,” a guard said, grabbing my arm. He was tall and rail-thin. I hadn’t seen him before. I struggled, still sure the thing in the cell was going to burst from the shadows and sink its teeth into me.

“Be quiet,” he snarled. “Come.”

Once I realized I was being taken out of the cell, I practically ran. The guard clamped down on my arm.

“Stay calm,” he said. “Act normal.”

I twisted my head to look at him, and I saw the flicker as his features changed, just for a second.

“Cal?” I hissed.

“I said, act normal,” he growled, and moved me to the side as two Proctors passed, holding flashlights and passkeys, doing cell checks.

“Where you taking the terrorist?” one asked, curiosity lighting his eyes. “They got her in the box already?”

“Top floor,” Cal said authoritatively.

“What, already?” said the other. “They ain’t even gonna ask her any questions?”

“Hey, I don’t give the orders,” Cal said, and I could smell the sweat seeping through his ill-fitting uniform. I decided I didn’t want to know where he’d gotten it.

“I hear that,” said the first, and they walked on.

Cal exhaled. “That was close. Conrad’s waiting down at the dock. We have to be fast, before they realize anything’s amiss.”

“Conrad?” I blinked in shock. It took me a moment to realize the only way my brother could have known where we were going, or that we’d been caught and taken to Alcatraz, was if he’d been following us. And for him to follow us, Cal would have had to tell him our eventual destination.

“I cannot believe him,” I said. “Or you. Of all the bone-headed, stupid risks to make Conrad take … He doesn’t even have a Weird, Cal! He could be in real danger coming after us!”

“Shut up,” Cal said. “You’re a prisoner, remember? Act like you’re afraid of me.”

I lowered my eyes, realizing he was right. If I wanted out, I had to act obedient. And Conrad might not have been able to change his skin or create Gates, but the plain fact was, he was outside the prison and we weren’t. I was going to give my brother the largest hug. Right after I slapped him for taking such a huge chance and putting himself in real danger.

Cal and I hustled down what seemed an endless maze of halls, taking sharp rights and lefts, while the entire time my heart was screaming that at any moment this was all going to end with a bullet or the zap of a shock pistol.

Cal and I came to a mesh-enclosed staircase, which led down, into darkness, or up, toward the pulsing blue light.

This close, I could discern another sound over the buzzing of electric current—screaming. It was so high and sustained I’d taken it to be background noise, but it was the droning cry of a creature in unbearable pain.

Cal’s nostrils flared and he began to shake. I couldn’t move, shackled as I was, so I nudged him with my elbow. “What’s wrong?”

“I know that sound,” he whispered. “I remember that sound.…”

Before I could stop him, he was up the stairs, leaving me to follow awkwardly.

I had some inkling of what had Cal so upset, but nothing could have prepared me for what we saw when we crested the stairs and came to a small room at the top of the cell blocks.

Six tables were arranged in a circle, the sort of tables I’d often seen in the madhouse while visiting Nerissa—hard enamel surfaces fitted with leather straps to keep the patients still. A wheel and spring on the underside allowed the tables to be tilted this way or that.

My stomach lurched as I looked at the ghouls strapped to the tables. They didn’t look like Cal—they had the gray sagging skin, stringy hair and vaguely canine faces of depth-dwelling ghouls, ones that had rarely seen the light.

Attached to each of their heads was a metal apparatus, and blue light pulsed from a glowing globe suspended from the ceiling. Each time it did, symbols projected on a screen flashed before the ghouls’ eyes, and they started screaming anew.

I knew we should move, but Cal stood stock-still, shaking. In Lovecraft, Proctors burned ghoul nests, and the stink of burning hair and flesh sometimes wafted on the wind as far as the Academy.

But this was different—this wasn’t something I had to imagine and could forget if I needed to. The ghouls were alive, and they were in pain.

I hadn’t had the best encounters with Cal’s more bloodthirsty brothers, but his pack, and Cal himself, had never given me any reason to hate ghouls.

Cal snarled, and I could see his human face start to slip away. He could only “take the skin” when he wasn’t under stress or in pain, and when he started to lose control, the real Cal came out.

Distracted as we both were, it was a wonder I saw the flash of white before a doctor wearing a long coat leaped from the shadows beyond the table and slashed at Cal with a scalpel. It caught the arm of his too-big Proctor uniform and he howled in pain, lashing out blindly.

The doctor danced out of the way. He was screaming something, but it was hard to hear over the constant cries of pain, the buzzing of the current and the hiss of aether powering the whole thing.

Even shackled, I knew I had to do something. Cal was too angry and panicked to defend himself, so I slammed into the doctor from the side, using all my weight. My scarred shoulder, where the muscles had never quite been the same, gave a scream of pain as loud as the keening ghouls’.

We both went over, but the doctor had his hands free and got on top of me. When he saw my face, he blinked. “You’re—” he started, but I snapped my forehead up and into his nose. It was a desperate move, and my skull rang with pain. I felt elated, though, when the doctor yelped and fell back, dropping the scalpel.

Cal appeared at my shoulder. “Stay down,” he snarled, in a voice I’d only heard him use once before, “unless you want worse than that.”

I didn’t want to look at him, but I forced myself to. This was my friend. He wouldn’t hurt me.

I hoped.

Cal’s jaw was long, and his teeth were longer, poking over his lips. The uniform had shredded at the pressure points where his spiny limbs had changed. His eyes were pure gold, pupilless and inhuman. I held out my hands to him, in what I hoped was a slow and nonthreatening gesture. This is Cal, I reminded myself. If you don’t panic, he won’t panic.

“Can you unlock these?” I asked. “I think the secret of our daring escape is out.”

Cal fumbled for the keys, his long veiny fingers having a hard time grasping the tiny tool.

I took it from him, and our skin brushed. My shoulder throbbed, the scar reminding me that even if I trusted him with my life, Cal was still a monster in this moment.

As my shackles unlocked, the doctor sprang up again and made a beeline for me. I turned, gripping one side of the shackle and swinging the other at his head. It connected with his temple and he dropped, his body making a wet, heavy sound against the cement floor.

“He doesn’t listen,” I told Cal. He was already starting for the tables, though, and paid me no attention.

“We have to help them,” he said. “We have to do something.”

“All right,” I agreed tentatively. “But if we free them, they’re going to attack me.” I pointed at the sharp rib bones and cracked lips of every ghoul. “They’re starving.”

I wanted to help them—truly I did—but I would be no good to anyone, Cal included, if I were in pieces.

Cal ignored me, though, and I held tight to the shackles. Even though they’d eventually be poison to me, I wasn’t about to leave myself defenseless.

He freed each ghoul gently and started to unhook the steel contraption on the closest one’s head, but then stopped. He went even paler, and gripped his stomach.

“I can’t,” he said. “They’re bolted in.”

I shut my eyes, forcing myself to breathe normally, and then approached. The ghoul on the table moaned, translucent eyelids fluttering.

“No way out,” he muttered to Cal. “They tried to put pictures in my brain. Tried to make me into a killer. For the humans. Tried to make me take their orders. All of us. The pictures are in our brain.”

I looked at Cal, whose face slackened. A cloudy tear worked its way down his cheek.

“I’m so sorry this was done to you,” he murmured. “I’ll get you out of here.”

“No,” the ghoul croaked. “Nothing to be done. You have to help us.”

“I am,” Cal told him. “I am helping you. I’ll get this off somehow and you can get out of here.”

“NO,” the ghoul gasped. “You need to end it. We’re not going anywhere. The pictures, they talk to us. Tell us to kill our own kind for the Proctors.” He looked up at Cal. “You have to flip the kill switch. End it now.”

He pointed at a circuit panel with a master switch, one that I could tell would release enormous voltage if flipped.

Understanding dawned on Cal’s face, and he started to shake his head, but the ghoul on the table snarled. “You owe it to us,” he said. “We’re brothers, under the skin. We don’t want to live like this.”

I touched Cal on the other arm. “It would be the kindest thing,” I whispered, and meant it. Whatever the Proctors had done to these ghouls, it was cruel and had destroyed their minds beyond repair. Trapped as they were in this infernal machine, death would be the kindest way out.

Cal nodded at the ghoul and then at me, and then walked toward the circuit board.

“I’m sorry,” I told the ghoul. “So sorry about everything.” Was this where I’d been headed, I wondered? This room, to be brainwashed into being whatever the Proctors wanted me to be? Or tortured? Or simply to stay in that cell until I starved?

Who knew? And who cared? I’d known the Proctors were evil, but I’d never had it driven home quite so thoroughly how sick and disgusting the entire system and the lie it supported were.

Maybe the Great Old Ones coming was the best thing that could happen. Clean slate, start over. Wipe the Proctors and their ideas from the face of the world.

The ghoul grabbed my arm with his clawed hand and I shrieked, startled, as he gasped out a few words at me.

“You,” the ghoul said. “You, the destroyer. The one who walks. He knows you. His great eye sees everything. There is nothing you can hide, nothing you can do. Stay away,” he rasped. “Stay in the light, and keep away from his sign. Do not gaze upon it. Do not even speak his name.”

“Who?” I demanded. “Who are you talking about?”

“He who lives beyond,” the ghoul whispered. “The enemy of the one who walks. Never meet. Never let him gaze into your soul.”

Cal threw the switch. All six of the ghouls gasped and twitched, but they stopped after a time and, one by one, went still.

The ghoul’s grip slackened, and his hand fell away from me, but I stayed where I was, frozen to the spot, until Cal grabbed me and I realized the ghouls’ screaming had been replaced by the whoop of alarms.

“Time to go,” Cal said. He was human again, his face set into the sort of grim expression I’d hoped never to see on my happy, optimistic best friend.

We ran down the stairs and all the way to the docks. The source of the alarm was clearly the ghouls’ room, and Proctors shoved past us without taking much notice. I kept my face shielded, and Cal slung his Proctor jacket over me and gave me his hat, so we looked as if we’d been rousted out of our bunks rather than escaped from a cell.

The boat Conrad had stolen, a small Proctor launch, was bobbing at the dock, and he stared at us as we jumped aboard.

“You can never manage to make a quiet exit, can you, Aoife?” he said. “I’m just sitting here and suddenly the entire place lights up. Are we going to get shot at?”

“Not if you drive the boat,” I said. “And by the way, I’m happy to see you, too.”

Conrad turned the boat around and pushed us out into the bay. He gave me a quick smile that let me know he wasn’t really mad, and I had the sneaking suspicion he might even be enjoying himself a little. I decided that he deserved to forget about what had happened to Archie for a little while, and I surely was glad to see him.

Conrad opened up the throttle and Alcatraz retreated, becoming only points of light behind us, indistinguishable from the leviathans roaming the bay.

Cal was silent, and I was equally mum, wrapping my arms around myself to guard against the chill and spray.

Relieved as I was to escape, and happy as I was that we’d all made it back toward the city, I couldn’t shake the ghoul’s words from my mind, and the terror they instilled within me was positively unnatural.

That made two messages now about what awaited me in the Deadlands, should I manage the crossing. Nothing specific, but that just made it worse. The phrase played over and over, like a broken aethervox, as the boat bounced across the waves toward the light and steam and life of the city.

“He who lives beyond,” the ghoul had whispered in my ear. “Enemy of the one who walks.”